Rains will be on time, says CSIR’s forecast

The computer-generated prediction says the country will receive 869 mm of rainfall from the South West monsoon this year (the average mean monsoon rainfall is 887 mm). If we indeed have a normal monsoon for the 14th consecutive season, it would set a record of sorts in the last 100 years. So far, the longest spell of normal rains has been for 13 years.

However, there is little cause to rejoice as scientist P. Goswami, in-charge of the group, warned that this means we are at the edge of a drought or excess rainfall.

The monsoon is expected to hit the Kerala coast on June 1, Hyderabad on June 5, Mumbai, Nagpur, Calcutta and Bhubaneswar on June 10, Bhuj and Lucknow on June 15 and Jodhpur, Chandigarh and New Delhi close to July 1. Since the country’s agriculture industry still depends heavily on the South West monsoon, both policy-makers and farmers eagerly await the information from the C-MMACS as well as the Indian Meteorology Department’s annual prediction — which will be released on May 25.

The predictions of C-MMACS, which has been using a different model for the last seven years, have been on the mark.

The IMD bases its prediction on 16 different parametres — for example, snow cover in Eurasia, atmospheric pressure in Argentina in April, Australia in spring and snow cover on Himalayas. On the other hand, C-MMACS uses the data of 100 years of monsoon — they are yet to finish the exercise for all the parameters this year.

This cognitive network-based model is programmed to analyse new monsoon data by relating it to existing data, in this case 100 years’ monsoon. In fact, since they can use the same model to predict the monsoon two years in advance, they have forecast 104 per cent of rainfall for next year.